A little more on Wikipedia and gender

Kevin Drum has an interesting take on the article I discussed earlier today:

Still, even accounting for that, the gender disparity is real. But I suspect the reason has less to do with women having trouble asserting their opinions and more to do with the prevalence of obsessive, Aspergers-ish behavior among men. After all, why would anyone spend endless hours researching, writing and editing a Wikipedia post for free about either The Simpsons or Mexican feminist writers? I think that “having an opinion on the subject” is far too pale a description of why people do or don’t do this. You need to be obsessed. You need to really care about the minutia of the subject and whether it’s presented in exactly the right way. And you need to care about this in a forum with no professional prestige. You’re really, truly doing it just for the sake of the thing itself.

I’ve long been convinced that this tendency toward obsession is one of the key differences between men and women. I don’t know what causes it. I don’t know if it helped primitive men kill more mastodons during the late Pleistocene. But it does seem to be real, and it doesn’t seem to be something that’s either culturally encouraged or discouraged in children of either gender. I just don’t know. But I’ll bet that an obsessive outlook on life is something that produces a lot of Wikipedia articles.

I think he may very well be onto something. There’s got to be some studies on this somewhere.